Long, Hot, Dry Summer and the Great Brown Spot

 Long, Hot, Dry Summer and the Great Brown Spot

By Bobby Neal Winters

Yesterday I mowed for the first time since mid-June. 

If you follow this space, you know I’ve had kind of an interesting summer. I had surgery to repair a hernia just after the 4th of July.  A little over two weeks later, I came down with COVID.

While either of those events could’ve affected my mowing schedule, neither of them actually did.  As those of you who work under the auspices of NALM (the National Association of Lawn Mowers) and seek to improve themselves and improve the world one lawn at a time, the weather this summer has been the overriding concern.

It simply stopped raining at some point.

Those of you who are absolute sticklers for the literal truth will note that there has been some scattered rain.

Well, yeah, there has.  Scattered be the key modifier there.  I remember one morning I got up to walk and experienced an 8-inch rain.  Eight-inch in the sense that the drops were falling 8 inches apart. 

The lack of rain affects mowing in two ways.  The first of these is that the grass simply doesn’t grow.  It gets to a certain point and says, “No, I am done.”

But there is also the dust.  The lack of rain causes dust;  Mowing stirs up the dust; and if you mow, you are walking around in a cloud of dust like Pig Pen from Charlie Brown. I once caught pneumonia from doing that when I was a teenager.

Yesterday, I caught things just right.  We had received just enough rain to settle the dust.  The backyard had begun to look a little scraggly. 

For those of you who are not familiar with the word “scraggly,” it is used by my people in the following way.  There comes a time in a young man’s life when he begins to shave.  At a certain point, he says to himself that he will try to grow a beard so he stops shaving.  The result of this is a beard described by the adjective “scraggly.” 

Just as the cure for a scraggly beard is to shave it, the cure to a scraggly lawn is to mow it.  The light, dust-settling rain we received gave me the window I needed.

Having been almost two months since I’d mowed, I was tuned into the whole experience.  I was attentive to even the most minute detail.  I gained some insights.

During normal times, my lawn suffers from--among other things--being shaded by a lot of trees.  The shade keeps the grass from getting all of the sunlight the rest of the grass gets. During times when we are actually getting rain, this is a bad thing, but when we have had weeks upon weeks of hot, dry, sunny weather, something else happens.

The shade has protected the grass beneath it.  It reduced the evaporation of what little moisture there was in the soil.

This was made clear to me when it came time to mow around the “Great Brown Spot.”

You have probably heard of the “Great Red Spot” on Jupiter.  It is a storm in Jupiter’s atmosphere that has been going on for hundreds of years.  Our astronomers have been observing it since almost the time of Galileo and wondered what it was for a long, long time. 

If there are astronomers on Jupiter who are looking our way, they have no doubt seen the “Great Brown Spot” in my backyard and are wondering what causes it.

The “Great Brown Spot” is the part of my lawn that gets the most direct sunlight.  In the spring, it is very healthy because of this.  It is not so much of an advantage in the midst of a hot, dry summer.

(As a side note, I got to thinking about what the astronomers on Jupiter would be like.  In science fiction, it has been speculated that the inhabitants of gas giants like Jupiter would have to be like dirigibles or blimps.  That is to say, they would be giant bags of gas.  This would make them ideal candidates for a life of politics or maybe even positions at the university, but I digress.)

In contrast to this, there are parts of the backyard that are positively verdant. I noticed that this required a combination of factors: 1) As noted earlier, shade; 2) being near the water spouts of the gutters from the house; 3) being near one of the flower beds that my wife waters.

Indeed, there is one spot that almost caused my mower to drown out.  We have a little inflatable pool for our grandsons to use.  It is filled with a garden hose which leaks.  The place where the hose leaks may be the nicest square-foot of lawn in town.

If it doesn’t rain, I won’t have to mow again this year, but quite frankly, I felt like a better human being once the job was done.  Maybe we should work in prayers for rain whenever we have the Lord’s attention.

Just sayin’.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )